The Japanese voted instant noodles their most important 20th-century invention, Sony Walkmans notwithstanding.

ECONOMIST: Momofuku Ando

In the early 1980s, with Frog Design in West Germany, he worked on projects including Sony Walkmans and Apple computers.

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Consumer tastes do change, but the best analogy might be to Sony (radios, TVs, Walkmans) which stayed on top for 25-30 years before losing its way.

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Even two decades after the Apollo moon mission, all the energies of hardware manufacturing firms were focused on semiconductors (like DRAMs or CPUs), color televisions, cars, Walkmans, CDs, VHS recorders, and a new consumer item called the personal computer.

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We realised that if you had digital music, music that was digitised that is, then you could store it on flash memory or a hard drive and thus create a music player that could store many more songs that the Sony Walkmans or portable CD players that were the rage at the time.

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